Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 1989, Vol. 56, No. 1,41-53
Copyright 1989 by the American Psychological Association, Inc.
0022-3514/89/$00.75
Intuitive Interactionism in Person Perception: Effects of SituationBehavior Relations on Dispositional Judgments Yuichi Shoda and Walter Mischel Columbia University
Jack C. Wright Brown University and Wediko Children's Services To examine the effects of the relationships between behavior and the situation in which it occurs, we manipulated such relations and exposed subjects to them. Impressions were similar when based on the behaviors presented with situations unspecified (e.g., child hits) or when the situations in which they naturally occurred were specified (e.g., child hits when provoked). However, when situations were specified, subjects' impressions more accurately predicted individual differences in the children's actual levels of overall aggressive behavior. When the veridical situation-behavior relations were increasingly altered, the targets were perceived as being less plausible and increasingly maladjusted and odd, and correlations decreased between the perceived level of the children's aggressiveness and their actual aggressivebehavior. Thus, both personality impressionsand predictive accuracy were influenced by the relations between the target's behaviors and their situational contexts.
Both personality psychologists and social psychologists have long been concerned with the respective roles and relative importance of personal dispositions versus situational factors in social perception (e.g., Heider, 1958; Higgins & Bargh, 1987; Jones & Davis, 1965; Kelley, 1967; Mischel, 1968). A polarity has been created in which the role of dispositions is compared with that of situations, often preemptively, so that either one or the other is seen as crucial, without attending in detail to their potential interactions, as noted years ago (e.g., Bowers, 1973; Mischel, 1973; West, 1983). In the polarization of dispositions v e r s u s situations, the interaction between the person's behaviors and the situations in which they unfold have been neglected, in spite of articulate calls to investigate them (e.g., Zukier, 1986) and a formal framework to study the joint effects of situational
and behavioral cues on the meaning and identification of behavior (Trope, 1986). In this research we developed a paradigm for studying how information about the relations between situations and behavior affects the nature and predictive utility of peol~le's personality impressions. In this paradigm, an interactive computer program is used to present the behaviors of targets, based on actual children's personalities, with or without any explicit information about the situation in which the behaviors occurred. This methodology also makes it possible to manipulate the degree to which the relations between the targets' presented behavior and the particular situation correspond to the actual patterns displayed by the actual children on which they are based. With this paradigm we investigated how situation-behavior relations influence the nature of people's dispositional inferences and their correlations with the target's actual social behavior. The situations we considered were interpersonal events or contexts (e.g., the actions and identity of others), not the physical setting in which the behavior occurred. There are several ways in which perceivers may use situational information to form dispositional inferences. One possibility is that they simply ignore situations, basing their dispositional judgments directly on the overall frequency with which relevant behaviors occur, regardless of their relations to the particular situation. This situation-free approach seems most consistent with the view that person perception is systematically biased so that people go quickly from behavior to disposition and overestimate the contributions of dispositional variables while underestimating situational variables (e.g., Gilbert & Jones, 1986; Mischel, 1979; Nisbett & Ross, 1980; Ross, 1977). If observers were guided only by this approach, then their impressions of targets' personalities should be the same as long as the total frequencies of the behavior presented is held constant.
This research was supported in part by Grants MH39349 and 39263 from the National Institute of Health to Walter Mischel and by Biomedical Research Support Grant BS603342 from Brown University to Jack C. Wright. We would like to thank the staffand children of Wediko Children's Services, whose cooperation made this work possible. We are especially grateful to Hugh Leightman and Harry Parad, Wediko's directors, for their general support, Mary Powers for her vital role in coordinating and sustaining the daily data collection at Wediko throughout the summer, and Jan Eisenman for her involvement in the planning and management of the research operation throughout the year. We also thank Henri Zukier for his valuable comments on the earlier drafts of this article. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Yuichi Shoda or Walter Mischel, Department of Psychology,Schermerhorn Hall, Columbia University, New York, New York 10027, or to Jack C. Wright, Walter S. Hunter Laboratory of Psychology,Brown University, 89 Waterman Street, Providence, Rhode Island 02912. 41
